Cal Poly Senior Project team here:

When we started our journey with OpenFarm we first asked ourselves, “What is our customer segment?”, “Who are we bringing this product to, and why is this website valuable to them?’”

We followed up this question by sending out a survey to all members of the Kickstarter campaign to try and see who supported the idea and identify characteristics of that culture.   We asked many questions, such as “What about OpenFarm are you most excited about?” and “Would you be available for a followup interview?”, both of which we got fantastic answers for from the over 400 respondents! Yet, of all the information we gathered from this survey, we found the most significant pieces of information on these two graphs. (click them to enlarge)

Based off the data, it seemed we had two primary customer segments. First, the beginning gardener, having gardened for 5 years or less comprising roughly 67% of the respondents. Second, the experienced gardener who comprised roughly 20% of respondents.  It was with this information that we began to outline questions to ask the beginning and experienced gardener in order to gain more information on what their pains were and how we could best solve those pains through OpenFarm!

Next up: our interview process!